Too Human (KXT on Broadway) ★★½

Written by Michael McStay. KXT on Broadway. Jul 5 – 20, 2024.

Part ‘Percy Jackson’, part 80s teen sex farce, Too Human is funny as long as you don’t think about it too deeply but don’t worry, you’re not supposed to think deeply about it.

14-year old Monty (Rhiaan Marquez) is being bullied at school. The daughter of a mermaid and a minotaur, she looks freakishly different from everyone else in her community. While they are all human/animal hybrids, she is simply… human. In a quest for popularity, Monty adopts a disguise as an ibis named Danielle to attract the leonine bad boy Harry (Lachie Pringle) and earn some cred in the school (with some support from her mum Beverly (Luisa Galloway) who is missing her former life as a siren). But will Monty sell out her best friend Lewis (Rachel Seeto) for a chance at scoring a pash at the Year 8 disco?

A lot of the time, Too Human feels like a comedy sketch that has been stretched beyond its premise. Even at just over 90 minutes in duration, it quickly loses its punch and becomes predictable. The juvenile humour is simply that, and while the odd one-liner may tickle your knowledge of antiquity, to call it “sophomoric” would be giving the gags more academic credit than they’re due. For all the banter, you can’t avoid the fact that jokes about fingering a 14 year old school-girl aren’t funny or clever.

Coupled with a number of performances that seemed to come straight from the Ministry of Silly Voices (vaguely amusing for the first 10 minutes and then progressively more grating as the show went on) any attempts at subtlety got completely trashed. Director Sammy Jing keeps things moving like a madcap comedy which goes a long way to glossing over the weaknesses of the script, but the pantomime over-acting was hard to see past. This is more a personal thing for me, but I can’t stand “look at me, I’m being funny” performances. 

In the midst of this, Jasper Lee-Lindsay (who I last saw in Belvoir’s Blessed Union in 2023) steals the show as Andy, a moody, angst ridden crocodile poet, with frustratingly small upper arms. Of all the performances on stage, he pitches his ridiculousness at just the right level to let us feel real emotions for Andy as he yearns for his hidden crush. The other real standout is Production Designer Hannah Tayler’s costumes which are inventive and hilarious in their own right.

The script does provide some occasionally fun moments and clever twists based on the mystical/animalistic premise, but sometimes I was left wondering if it had been really thought through. The ending particularly paints Monty in a terrible, narcissistic light to the point where I simply didn’t give a shit what happened to this horrid, entitled teen. Her friends deserve better than her. This wasn’t aided by the fact I’d recently seen Pixar’s Inside Out 2 which walks a similar “will-teen-girl-sell-out-friends-to-be-popular” trajectory but does it with a lot more insight.

For all the bits of witty dialogue, and there are some great lines and sly jokes, Too Human isn’t human enough. There is a lack of genuine character building which robs the play of any resonance, leaving us with nothing more than first-draft dick jokes and over-acting. Too Human takes inspiration from the teen sex comedies of the 80s, but doesn’t elevate them at all. In fact it seems to have dragged up all the bits we should have left behind on the way.